Tyler Clementi’s body was pulled from the Hudson River on September 29th, 2010, a week after he had changed his Facebook status to read “jumping off gw bridge sorry.” That same day, Gawker (“Today’s Gossip is Tomorrow’s News) posted a screen shot of Dharun Ravi’s Twitter account, with Ravi’s tweets about spying on Clementi highlighted:   I dare you to video chat me from 9:30 to 12 Ravi is now on...

So, if you had to predict what happened on election day in Loudoun County one week after the Loudoun County Republican Committee (LCRC) made national news for circulating an image of Obama as a zombie with a bullet hole in his forehead, what would you say: A.) As news of the image spread, outrage grew in the week leading up to the election, handing the Republican candidates in Loudoun County a devastating setback at the polls. B.) There was...

In case you blinked and missed this Halloween bombshell, let me bring you up to date. Act One: The Mailing (2 AM, October 31st, 2011) What is this, you ask? Is that really a picture of President Obama with a bullet hole in his head? It turns out that this collage of images accompanied an email invitation to the Loudoun County GOP’s constituents in Northern Virginia early Halloween morning inviting them to a bash later that afternoon. The...

Act One, Scene one: April 27th, late in the afternoon. Returning from a matinee performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Socialism, with a Guide to the Scriptures,” (the title is a snide reference to an unfinished dissertation, twenty years in production, by the main character’s son). There’s a line stuck in my head that’s been looping the whole train ride home....

Without much effort, you can find images of how quickly life has changed for the people of Japan. New York Times Front Page, March 16, 2011 What is it like to experience such a disaster? One minute you’re sitting in your home; the next you’re washed out to sea. Do you want to survive, having seen your neighborhood erased? Do you know where your kids are? Your friends? Your past? * What does it feel like to wait for a tsunami to...

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong makes the startling–and since much debated–claim that writing “heightens consciousness,” because it alienates the writer from the present moment. He goes on to explain: Alienation from a natural milieu can be and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity, but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as...

I woke this morning to find notification of comments on four of the five sections of “Worlds End, Worlds Begin,” the video that eventually led to the launching of this blog. That’s a puzzler, I thought. The video is a remixed version of a lecture I gave at a conference on the humanities at Clemson early in 2007. It’s the first multimedia piece Paul Hammond and I worked on together; the first thing we posted to YouTube. We...

Nice title, eh? * We are fortunate to be living through the greatest change in human communication in human history. This change is bigger and more momentous than our distant ancestors’ slow crawl from the muck to dry land where, over great swaths of time, they came to grunt at one another meaningfully. It is more significant than the invention of the alphabet. It is more important than anything that was set in motion by the grinding gears of...